Prime Minister-designate Binyamin Netanyahu of Likud is close to signing a coalition deal with the Yisrael Beiteinu party, sources involved in coalition talks reported Wednesday night. The two parties are expected to sign a final agreement on Thursday.
Netanyahu has offered the party several senior ministries, sources say. Yisrael Beiteinu is Israel's new third-largest faction, and without its participation Netanyahu would be unable to form a majority coalition, as both the more left-leaning Kadima and Labor parties have already announced that they will not join him.
Sources in Yisrael Beiteinu expressed less certainty than their Likud counterparts. There has been significant progress in coalition negotiations, but some issues remain unresolved, they said Wednesday.
One such issue could be the control of the Justice Ministry. Yisrael Beiteinu has requested the ministry, and has asked that current minister Daniel Friedmann serve in the next government as well.
Friedmann's attempts to balance judicial power by reducing the control that sitting judges have over the selection of new judges has created strong opposition to his stay in office among Supreme Court justices and the political Left.
Likud sources say that Friedmann will not be asked to stay on as justice minister in the next government, according to the Hebrew-language daily Maariv. Netanyahu has made several attempts to convince Yisrael Beiteinu to drop its demand for Friedmann as Justice Minister, and according to his aides is hoping the party will agree to appoint an external candidate or one of Yisrael Beiteinu's MKs.
Likud has made progress in negotiations with Shas as well, Likud officials said, and hopes to sign a deal with the party early next week. One major challenge in negotiations has been balancing the demands of the hareidi-religious Shas and United Torah Judaism (UTJ) parties with those of Yisrael Beiteinu, which has a large non-observant and non-Jewish Russian voter base and has demanded civil marriage and easier conversions to Judaism.